| Philharmonia Orchestra | |
| Esa-Pekka Salonen | Conductor |
| Pekka Kuusisto | Violin |
Opening the 2017/18 season, Esa-Pekka Salonen places the work of two contemporary Icelandic composers alongside Sibelius’ two final symphonies. Cast with light and shade, Symphony No. 6 emerges upwards from melodies forged out of a single stepwise motion: music of ‘pure cold water’, held Sibelius. For his Seventh, Sibelius crosses his entire symphonic landscape in a single movement, one idea generating another, expressing the ‘joy of life and vitality’.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Aeriality occupies the border between symphony and sound art, capturing in a world of clustering textures the feeling of gliding through the air with nothing or little to hold on to. Alongside, the UK première of Daníel Bjarnason’s Violin Concerto, a composer who Time Out New York have as ‘coming eerily close to defining classical music’s undefinable brave new world’.
General booking opens 8 February 2017 9:30 am
